Ever since I started playing with all three I have noticed some resources are very low in amount, im not talking a few sectors im talking mid game to end game over the whole map. Last three games ive had the same one causing problems, Carbon Fibre, the most ive ever had in a mid to end game is 18 sources, lowest was 12. Ive also had the same deal with Nekros Stone and Chromium. Ive had to get around it with designs that use as little of it as possible until I can get tech that doesnt use it, never had this problem with just DW+ROTS.

If it weren't like that I would be angry. The resource abundance was a real problem in the past. Such mid and endgames call resource war, big time!

Glad you think its useful to have 18 sources of carbon fiber out of 1400 stars ... so it would appear that the 'armchair generals' have gone into orbit, what did I expect from a 90% based tabletop wargame publisher.

Do you have colonies set to low? It only occurs at Continental worlds I think, so if you set them to low then yeah it will be rarer. Haven't had a problem myself, you must have a huge empire to need that many Carbon Fibre resources since I don't suffer the problem usually. Have had a Chromium problem once, but that was due to having 0 sources, 12 would have been fine

_____________________________

"My body may be confined to this chair, but my mind is free to explore the universe" - Stephen Hawking

I don't play that many games, and they don't tend to grow that old (but not to the extremes of the one in that other thread). But I am a bit surprised if 18 sources is not enough. But it does of course depend on how many 100s of colonies you got, and also how many ships are blown up in war.

Maybe it matters whether you start the game as "starter" or "mature", maybe the first kind builds some more stores during expansion.

I think carbon fiber is mostly (only) at continentals and marshy swamps, btw.

I find it mainly at marshy swamp worlds and sometimes at continentals. While it never seems to be particularly lacking in my games (apart from perhaps an early squeeze) I have many colonisables set so that may effect it.

That said I find that Carbon Fibre is the resource you will run short of most often. It used to be Polymer shortages but its abundance was raised and the amounts of it used in components dropped.

As you suggest you can play around it. In the early game if I am short of it I will cut back on thrusters, missiles and fighters. Later on I cut back on armour as well. 12 to 18 sounds low to me but hey, you've got to play the map and not let it play you.

- I have not played that many games. - They don't grow very old, because they "break" before that happens.

I have not played many Legends games, and have not have had a very long game in massive galaxy with massive empire. I have played ROTS games from 1 colony to the point where I have had colonies over most of a 700 star 10x10, and been able to basically take any empire on the first strike if I wanted... Without feeling a lack of resources. I think I took a 17 colony ugnari empire on one sweep once (all colonies at the same time), without there being any other empire looking significantly harder.

First off sorry for the rough post, Ive just paid out £50 on this and feel like ive been watching my dream car for the last few years only to have the money to buy it and then found out after purchase that someone has swapped the 2 litre engine for an 800 I rebuilt my PC so I could get up to spec for this, as I only like to play on the largest maps.

In the game with the 18 sources I had 106+ colonies, there were also distinct shortages of Nekros Stone, Chromium and Dilithium Crystal. And yes im aware that some resources are only available on certain planet types;

quote:

Carbon Fibre Marshy Swamp and Continental worlds Occurrence: moderate

Chromium Continental and Marshy Swamp worlds Occurrence: moderate

Dilithium Crystal Ocean worlds Occurrence: moderate

Nekros Stone Volcanic worlds Occurrence: common

None of them state the resource as rare, and Nekros is common, I set the availability of colonies to the highest setting and Galaxy life teeming and still no difference, I thought making more worlds would make more resources available. After the first few times I thought it might have something to do with the expansion setting, I know the manual seems to miss things, so I thought that maybe a higher setting than starting would maybe increase the resource amounts, like MOO2 in that as you change the galaxy age the resources increase or decrease, and that didn't help. I can find no mention of any change in resource policies with the feature list for Legends, Im a player that likes to learn the tech tree, to manipulate it to any given situation that my empire may come across, be it peace, trading or war. I dont mind having to work around things but the design components are not varied enough to allow you to deal with shortages of certain resources.

If it is the case that resource amounts were 'nerfed' in Legends than whoever did the testing could not have used the larger maps, and if they did it wasnt to see how big and powerful an empire they could create.

Yet again , and as I said, when last I played it was with ROTS and I really enjoyed it, thought by adding Legends I was just getting a few more bells and whistles added to the game, not taken away from it. If it was 'nerfed' in Legends there should be another slider on the galaxy screen to increase or decrease the galaxy resources, for those of us who are not 'armchair generals' and dont want to mount the German / Russian offensive of WWII. Give people the choice to choose whether they want to have less or more resources, dont just just take it away without giving them the option to change things back if they dont like the new resource model.

I agree that a slider could be a very good idea (or to have it included in some other obvious sliders, like difficulty).

If you look in the expansion planner. What are the demand and amount levels for those resources?

Why do I ask? Because I wonder if it is lack of resources or poor transport logic...

I know where your coming from, cant give the exact numbers but the galaxy demand was always above my stock amount, and I tried noting where the densest pockets of the resources I was short of were and building minimal spaceports with good sized cargo holds so to act as trade drop offs but no matter what I tried it always ended up the same, build a spaceport then wait and wait and wait till it was built, then wait for my base stock amount of resources to climb a little then build another base and wait and wait, I cant even build two at once without causing the whole economy to go into the red.

And no spare sources in your non trivial empire either? If you design around shortages, I guess you have tried to cure them as well, though.

That's what I meant when I said I don't mind working around it with the designs, but you can't, there should be alternate design pieces that have different resource needs but do nearly the same job. Not sure about smaller maps but on the large ones its a nightmare to get enough sources so the demand outweighs the usage without waiting for things to catch up, I have no problems in working the resource model just finding it difficult to work from having such small amounts. IMHO this was not worked out to well, it just seems that the amounts were reduced and no one took into account the knock on effect of those changes to the game, everyone plays the game differently, hence the idea of at least giving people the option to change the resource amount settings with a slider, so yes, extra difficulty would be added by introducing that slider. If I had not played DW with ROTS I would not have had a clue as to how to try to work around this, for new players it must be a a real brick wall.

I guess I would like to try this. What kind of settings apart from 15x15, max stars, abundant colony, teeming life... Do you run?

And would my 4G of ram (64 bit) survive the mature stages? :)

Im only on XP 32bit with 4 gig , well three as the other gig seems to get lost, and it works fine, take the FPS off auto and put it to 25, that made a lot of difference as well.

Settings I used, not my normal ones but I tried to max out what I thought might increase the resource base amounts, and Ive played this through on these settings to game end and victory twice, only difference is im using a custom race, the only thing there thats changed is the image, victory conditions (race file), biases, and characters so cant see that making a difference, first few games I played and noticed it was as the Kiadians so ive put them in the setup list.

Had a thought , not sure whether it counts but the custom race im using has volcanic as there homeworld type. I would imagine the abundant colony setting does a fair split on world types but the Kaidian are continental (Carbon Fibre) and my custom type volcanic (Nekros Stone), wouldnt account for the problems with Nekros but might for Carbon Fibre. Im about 60%+ of the map revealed on a new game with those settings and im at 22 sources for Carbon Fibre at present, this is the best Ive had so far, with 22 and at least 35%+ to go I might hit 30

I guess I would like to try this. What kind of settings apart from 15x15, max stars, abundant colony, teeming life... Do you run?

And would my 4G of ram (64 bit) survive the mature stages? :)

Im only on XP 32bit with 4 gig , well three as the other gig seems to get lost, and it works fine, take the FPS off auto and put it to 25, that made a lot of difference as well.

Settings I used, not my normal ones but I tried to max out what I thought might increase the resource base amounts, and Ive played this through on these settings to game end and victory twice, only difference is im using a custom race, the only thing there thats changed is the image, victory conditions (race file), biases, and characters so cant see that making a difference, first few games I played and noticed it was as the Kiadians so ive put them in the setup list.

XP only recognises I think 3gig maybe two so some of your memory is going to waste....I found Win 7 to be as good as XP. It's a great stable OS compared to that rubbish Vista. Honestly the time has come where upgrading from XP is a must do.

Honestly have no fear of Win 7. I heard some big game developer is ditching XP I think it was one of the FPS games...So when they start to ditch XP and make games that wont work on it it is time to upgrade.

The 3GB limit has nothing to do with which operating system, but XP should be switched anyways, since support is going towards the end...

The problem with memory is 32-bit computers, that lack address references for more than 3GB. This is no problem with 64 bit (considering that 33-bit is twice as much as 32-bit, 64-bit is quite a lot...).

As for resources, I have been busy colonizing the galaxy and invading everything in sight (Ugnary and Dhayut so far) with my Boskara crew. I have not noticed issues apart from missing a Dilithum or what they are called as the single 0 strategic sources after a not too long time. The game is closed for today, so no statistics. I have both continental and marsh colonization research (first thing the AI did), and have ice from Ugnari, desert from Dhayut, and Volcanic as native...

A few hours played, and all I have seen is the Guardians and a Gizzie explorer... And Pirates only at the extreme edges. I started hard just to limit cash a bit, not that it helps much.

Now if only the AI (which has R&D) could understand it is not a good idea to research all kinds of weapons, in particular when you got a racial torpedo setup. Beams, Phasers OR Rail guns to accompany them, pretty please?

First off sorry for the rough post, Ive just paid out £50 on this and feel like ive been watching my dream car for the last few years only to have the money to buy it and then found out after purchase that someone has swapped the 2 litre engine for an 800 I rebuilt my PC so I could get up to spec for this, as I only like to play on the largest maps.

In the game with the 18 sources I had 106+ colonies, there were also distinct shortages of Nekros Stone, Chromium and Dilithium Crystal. And yes im aware that some resources are only available on certain planet types;

quote:

Carbon Fibre Marshy Swamp and Continental worlds Occurrence: moderate

Chromium Continental and Marshy Swamp worlds Occurrence: moderate

Dilithium Crystal Ocean worlds Occurrence: moderate

Nekros Stone Volcanic worlds Occurrence: common

None of them state the resource as rare, and Nekros is common, I set the availability of colonies to the highest setting and Galaxy life teeming and still no difference, I thought making more worlds would make more resources available. After the first few times I thought it might have something to do with the expansion setting, I know the manual seems to miss things, so I thought that maybe a higher setting than starting would maybe increase the resource amounts, like MOO2 in that as you change the galaxy age the resources increase or decrease, and that didn't help. I can find no mention of any change in resource policies with the feature list for Legends, Im a player that likes to learn the tech tree, to manipulate it to any given situation that my empire may come across, be it peace, trading or war. I dont mind having to work around things but the design components are not varied enough to allow you to deal with shortages of certain resources.

If it is the case that resource amounts were 'nerfed' in Legends than whoever did the testing could not have used the larger maps, and if they did it wasnt to see how big and powerful an empire they could create.

Yet again , and as I said, when last I played it was with ROTS and I really enjoyed it, thought by adding Legends I was just getting a few more bells and whistles added to the game, not taken away from it. If it was 'nerfed' in Legends there should be another slider on the galaxy screen to increase or decrease the galaxy resources, for those of us who are not 'armchair generals' and dont want to mount the German / Russian offensive of WWII. Give people the choice to choose whether they want to have less or more resources, dont just just take it away without giving them the option to change things back if they dont like the new resource model.

Darkspire

If you look through the entire list of strategic resources you will see that the range is from moderate to very common. You have named 3 of the four moderate (i.e. most rare strategic) resouces, Silicon being the one missing, and Nekros is common, the middle level of abundance. (I think this information dates from RotS or even earlier though.)

I think the real difference with Carbon is that the amount used in components was raised in Legends from RotS. The only resource which I remember a specific comment on changing was Polymer which was made more abundant and its use in components reduced. But I would be surprised if they didn't tweak the amounts/yield percentages of resources since they did overhaul the use of them in components. Certainly my in game experience is that actually occuring instances of resources and their yield qualities changed somewhat. I also experienced a change (or rebalancing might be better) of resources after an earlyish patch, maybe 1.7.0.6. But I am flying by the seat of my pants here.

Please don't shoot me for saying so but my experience in Legends is that Carbon is easier to find, and I find it generally with larger yields. But I have always found substantially more sources of Carbon than the game(s) you recount. I do not find problems with the other resources you mention either, although in the later game, depending on your design choices there start to be large demands on Chromium and Dilithium along with a couple of other resources you tend not to need that much of earlier.

Your map settings are similar to the ones I use. The differences being things I doubt would make a difference in this regard (e.g. I go with many pirates and space monsters and generally with harsh homeworlds). I was going to suggest that you could start scum for a homeworld with Carbon but it appears your custom race will not support this.

You could make an offering to the god the RNG so that your punishment ends.

Thinking about it a bit more, and noticing that you mentioned your last 3 games in the opening post I wonder if a problem is being caused by your custom race? (Carbon, Chromium and Nekros occuring on continentals...) If you are satisfied that you are getting repeatable shortages which it seems the rest of us aren't try playing a couple of games with exactly the same settings but with the default Kiadians. If the abundance of those resources is substantially higher then problem located (and we've all started to learn something ). Alternatively you could try asking about this effect in the modifications forum, I know a few people have made race mods...

No I am not thinking about racial specials. That would not cause a difference in the spawning of resource locations.

My reasoning is that the only difference that we know about between Darkspire's problematic games and some of the games the rest of us have played on the similar or same map settings is the use of a custom Kiadian race with a volcanic homeworld. Hence maybe it is the custom race causing the resource imbalance. What the intermediate connection is we can only speculate. (Map being keyed to the type of homeworld?) The only way to see if this is so is for Darkspire to play with the standard Kiadians over at least a couple of games and then compare the number of resource locations by type.

The only other explanation I can think of is the RNG god. It is always possible but it seems a bit extreme and should not be happening game after game.

Ive tried 4 testing games now and I still end up with the same result, a bottle neck on construction created by Carbon Fibre that only starts to clear when I start to move up the tech tree. Ive tried the Kiadians and my own race twice each. It could be my fault though, although ive played 4 games through ive tried a few other games with a few changes to how I play and I think that there are two problems, I can get my economy with a 300-400k profit within a month or so of starting a game and use that income to pay for fast tracking research, the advisor then asks me to upgrade things so I click approve and the ships start queueing up at the spaceport for re-fits, then (this is where I feel its my own fault) I am still fast tracking research (really not sure about this though, if the option is there to fast track should I not use it? Getting higher up the tree is always the best place to be and puts the player in a more favorable position IMHO), my advisor then asks me to upgrade, the ships are still in the queue for the re-fit and so, I presume, are now queueing for the new upgrades as well. Then he pops up with a suggestion for a space port so I agree and before I know it, even with watching my stock levels for resources the carbon fibre is in the red to a tune of about -50 to -60 and at this point im lucky if I have 1 source of Carbon Fibre, so the stock levels just cant keep up with demand. Ive tried ignoring the advisor when he requests to build a spaceport and that did help a little but the real problem lies with the research and ship upgrades, ive tried fast tracking on one item and leaving the next to progress at its normal rate but that still didnt help the queues at the spaceports and the Carbon Fibre levels. I realise that the tech tree has nothing to do with the stock levels but as each upgrade becomes available the advisor pops up with a suggestion for upgrading, ive tried skipping component level upgrades, like use the first, ignore the second, use the third level etc but that really doesnt help either. I realise most of you on here play, I presume, on minimal advisor settings, I can design my own ships but to be honest the way the ship designer is in its current form its just not very good, not buggy or anything like that, more like wading through treacle, I really enjoy making designs to suit different things but the way the designer is laid out it in its current form is just to, well, antique and is just counter productive, its the best and worst part of DW IMHO so I let the AI sort the designs out now I have Legends as well and therein lies the problem, I think with ROTS the resource levels were higher and the advisor didnt need to check levels before suggesting something, with Legends that really needs looking at. Thats why you folks probably wouldnt notice, I only have him design and suggest ships and bases but even if I try to ignore the requests for builds I end up with the same problem until I can get past the Carbon Fibre need in the tech tree. You start with 6000 Carbon Fibre in the 'bank', and quite a few of the starting components need Carbon Fibre, I tend to expand as quick as possible till I bump into another race and the advisor ship requests keep coming as my empire starts to grow and the 6000 in the 'bank' just doesnt seem to be enough to keep me going till I can get the tech to mine faster and get more sources, most of the starting designs for ships tend to eat quite a bit, escort, 27 frigate, 35 destroyer 32, troop transport 30, exploration ship 35, colony ship 39, construction ship 44, and this is without the base needs for the resource. 6000 sounds great and should be enough but not being able to find enough sources before it runs out is just not happening.

Bottom line is I just have to put up having a year or two where the empire is stalled on growth and I have huge queues at the spaceports and nothing gets built till the need diminishes and the tech is available to circumvent the need for Carbon Fibre.

I find the settings use quite "boring" for a long stretch, but it was maybe due to starting out with a huge corner all by myself.

I don't fast track research, but research is not fast. I don't carry a hole lot of military ships (not many pirates around), and don't have a massive amount of retrofits. Also, I play with automated taxes, which keeps the growth down, and could help in "delaying" demand for resources.

It seems to play the game to try optimize as well as possible. I usually try to slow it down.

I will see when I pick up the game. I saved and quit at the start of a war, while building a lot of small space ports. My dear allies, some refugees, asked for help, and I have to help them out.

My best advice is for you to move to starting with a harsh homeworld. Although I run into different difficulties the problem is that normal homeworld settings make the game way too easy and hence it breaks somewhere if you play with any skill.

I can guarantee that you will not have 300-400k cashflow anytime soon. In fact, as long as you do not exploit tech trading, you will not be crash researching anything for quite some time as other demands for cash will stop you doing this. You will also be building less and not expanding as quickly.